Gentoo Linux Reloaded

nitro322 writes "Daniel Robbins, the leading developer for Gentoo Linux, has written an excellent O'Reilly Network article covering many of the various features of Gentoo, what's coming in version 1.4 (due out SOON), and why you should give it a try. If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?"

Comments

Stupid question

[scott1853]

Why should I use Gentoo? Really. Is there some huge feature comparison matrix for all the different distros? Is there really any major innovation between distros?

I don't run *nix that much. I have a dual boot at home for Mandrake 8.2 and W2K. Do different distros really only matter to the elite linux hackers?

Re:What am I waiting for?

[Zapman]

One of the things I do is leave a 2 gig or so partition around to 'fart around with'. That's enough space to do a full install of most distributions. This also lets me:

1) leveradge my existing linux swap partition
2) mount my home directory (though it might be in /mount/hda/home/zapman, I don't really care)
3) Learn a lot about other distributions without much cost. (2 gigs... come on.)

And with gentoo, you don't even have that cost... they have 'live cd's. Boot of the cd, and you have a working gentoo distribution in RAM. Great to play with. Great to play Unreal Tourny 2003 on linux! (that's the main point of the disk)

Re:All these weird names

[Monkelectric]

Hey, I named Gentoo, (seriously). I got invovled with the project when it was called Enoch because I was having some trouble compiling GTK because we'd stumbled onto some weird gcc bug (IIRC). I ended up working on some compiler tools and writing packages ...

Anyways, one day drobbins decided to change the name to something less secular, and so we sat around thinking up names ... We started thinking along the lines, what did we want to say about our linux? ... we bandied around lots of names, eventually I found some zoo site that said the Gentoo Penguin was the fastest pengiun there was ... and the name stuck